Robert Duncan. The Opening of the Field. Grove Press, 1960 [New Directions, 1973].

Recovery Project by Keith Newton

Robert Duncan is hardly in need of recovery as a major figure in American poetry, nor have his most famous poems ever lacked a wide audience. Yet much of the attention paid to Duncan continues to mark a point of serious divergence: between a rehashing of a few selected pieces and an engagement with his books as whole poetic entities. His earlier books, in particular, which are rarely read and discussed by younger poets except in considerations of highly anthologized selections or of their place in a literary chronology, constitute some of the most singular works of modern poetry. Though its status as a major achievement was once taken for granted, Duncan’s writing from the 1950s, culminating in 1960’s The Opening of the Field, has long been overlooked on a number of levels. As extraordinary as many of the individual poems in the volume are, what the large-scale construction of the book continues to offer is an insight into the transformations that twentieth-century poetry has undergone—not only how the structure of a book of poems is conceived, but also how poetic thought itself operates within such a structure. In The Opening of the Field, widely considered the transitional book of Duncan’s career and the beginning of his mature period as a writer, those elements long seen as hallmarks of poems like “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow”—the reoccurrence of words and images, the overlapping patterns and associations, the forward-moving yet reiterative development of ideas—are evident not only in individual pieces but also in the overall movement and organization of the book. This makes its integrity all the more significant, and the case for its continuing relevance all the more vital.

When The Opening of the Field was published in 1960, ten years had already passed since Charles Olson published his foundational essay “Projective Verse,” and though many of Olson’s tenets are obviously connected to the style and mode of Duncan’s writing, the book itself feels very far away from the purposes to which Olson’s “FIELD COMPOSITION” were meant to be put. Certainly Duncan “puts himself into the open” in terms of “line, stanza, over-all form,” and certainly he employs “the large area of the poem” as “the FIELD . . . where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other,” yet this form of poetic composition is entirely transformed in Duncan’s hands. Although he had a very specific idea in mind of what the theme of “the field” was meant to invoke—in her forthcoming biography of Duncan, Lisa Jarnot gives his explanation of its meaning in a 1958 Guggenheim application: “. . . the field was of a three-fold nature, ‘known intimately as the given field of my own life, intellectually as the field of language (or spirit), and imaginatively as the field given to Man (of many languages)’ ”—the word continuously shifts inside its web of associations, beginning with the alteration that occurs in rendering the book’s title out of the term “open field.” That “the field” of the title itself becomes the physical space of “a meadow” in the opening poem is only one of the many changes in figuration that the word undergoes: “the sun’s field,” “the field of accumulated good,” “a field of rapture,” “my lovely field,” each of these phrases echoing the nature of all human visions as they come to us “in a disturbance of words within words / that is a field folded.” As in “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow,” the first part of “The Propositions” also evokes the field as a place both real and imagined, a place both of nature and the mind, “a made place” that takes on the very contours of reality. “Out of the golden field the black crows fly / to Van Gogh’s black blood,” Duncan writes, later returning to the same image to find, “It is a gathering of crows, / omens, that animates the artifice.”

The evocation of painting—and the consequent tension elicited between the real and the imaginary—becomes a more central element in “A Poem Beginning With a Line by Pindar,” a longer poem that brings to bear as powerfully as any in the book the nature of Duncan’s inspiration on the forms his writing takes. Goya’s painting of Cupid and Psyche, along with the line of Pindar that opens the poem, sets into motion the dramatic process by which the mind recognizes how the construction of its sense of what is real occurs through the experience of its own reality—a drama guided by the experience of the writing itself. The narrative of the poem is not an external feature, but is the story of its own making, the story of the process by which it is made, allowing Duncan to conceive of the structure of the poem as, in itself, the structure of thought, or, as he writes in his 1968 essay “The Truth and Life of Myth,” “the reality of what we know to be true to our story-sense.” In the same essay, he describes the poem’s “inception”:

reading late at night the third line of the first Pythian Ode in the translation by Wade-Gery and Bowra, my mind lost the hold of Pindar’s sense and was faced with certain puns, so that the words light, foot, hears, you, brightness, begins moved in a world beyond my reading, these were no longer words alone but also powers in a theogony, having resonances in Hesiodic and Orphic cosmogonies where the foot that moves in the dance of the poem appears as the pulse of measures in first things.

The first line of Duncan’s poem, “The light foot hears you and the brightness begins,” is therefore entirely decontextualized in terms of syntactic or figurative meaning, and so the words that the line contains come to exist in the poem as the originating figurations of poetic inspiration. Hearing, beginning, measured movement: these are the first “steps” of poetry in the simultaneous awakening of music and vision. The correspondences of rhyme and half-rhyme, echo and repetition, that are traced through the following stanzas establish the process through which the mind determines the relations in the world that define its sense of reality, “an enduring design,” as the essay has it, “in which the actual living consciousness arises.”

Yet as Duncan writes elsewhere in “The Truth and Life of Myth,” “Focusing in on the process itself as the field of the poem, the jarring discord must enter the composition,” and this “discord,” this “disturbance,” effects not only the process of the poem’s making but also the very nature of language, as its deformations evoke the falsenesses, fragmentations, and desolations of history:

. . . only a part of the word in- jerrd.

The Thundermakers descend,

damerging a nuv. A nerb.

The present dented of the U

nighted stayd. States. The heavy clod?

Cloud. Invades the brain. What

if lilacs last in this dooryard bloomd?

Discord enters every aspect of life, which carries the seed of its own end within itself, as death is part of the natural order. But the final movement of the poem, “Oh yes! Bless the footfall where / step by step . . . ,” returns to the inception of the poem, reaffirmed by the ecstatic language and inspiring a new way of seeing: “the catalyst force that renders clear / the days of a life from the surrounding medium!” The movement backward to the poem’s opening parallels the movement of the final section backward to childhood, “before our histories began and we began.” The echoes of the opening language of the poem—“footfall,” “step by step,” “another tread,” “Who is there? O, light the light!”—evoke the processes embodied by childhood through which the illusions of reality “give way.” These processes are ongoing, a movement of turning and returning, in which even the poem’s inspiration, Pindar’s ode, is returned to, in the prose passage near the poem’s close, as an object of intellectual and spiritual contemplation that has a reality both external to the poem being written and internal to its entire creation.

What becomes clear in the Pindar poem is applicable to the shape of the book as a whole. “The Structure of Rime” sequence, thirteen poems broken up in different configurations throughout the book, illustrates on a large scale how this process of return and reconfiguration becomes a directive for creative thought—“the theme of revival the heart asks for,” as in “Atlantis”—as well as being a necessary aspect of the building and ordering of any structure at all. The book of course begins with the poet’s being “permitted to return” to “a place” that is, in fact, “of first permission,” making the possibility of “return” both inevitable and without end. Late in The Opening of the Field, an extraordinary group of poems presents a single sentence that in itself appears to bring together many of the major themes of the book, “The inbinding mirrors a process returning to roots of first feeling,” and then proceeds to break the sentence apart, with each piece initiating a separate poem that is in turn linked to the others in a continuous development. That this single sentence, this single idea, is broken apart only to be reconstituted within a larger structure reveals what it means that inside our ideas, inside our systems of thinking, other whole realities of thought are possible, other whole imaginative structures. But there is a troubling awareness in these poems of what this “process” means for our potential for knowledge or inspiration. “The inbinding” evokes both the turn inward, toward illumination and discovery, and also a form of constriction, all that “binds” us blindly to ourselves, while the “roots of first feeling” echo the “first permission” of the “meadow” as a kind of eden, a place of spiritual renewal where consciousness sees itself as a part of nature, yet these “roots” also conjure a sort of Freudian regression, an inability to escape from the limits and obsessions of the self. These simultaneous forms of liberation and blockage “mirror” each other across this sentence that is at once singular and broken, giving us a vision of life that contains many other visions inside itself.

Written almost fifty years ago, not long after the devastations of the first half of the century and in the shadow of those to come, The Opening of the Field remains one of our most moving attempts to restore, in a world left spiritually barren, some sense of “the human greenness.” There is a sense throughout the book that an unanswerable question lies at its heart: to what purpose, to what end, does the poetry direct its energies? To “the boundaries of the field,” where the mind stops, where language stops, where our stories end? Yet what we find from the beginning of the book is that thought itself is a restorative process, that even as it is directed toward its own boundaries, it is guided by an instinct to create. “In the field of the poem,” Duncan writes in “The Propositions,” “the unexpected / must come.”